The slight differences between these two images provide enough information for a computer to mathematically create a brand-new image as if the camera had been moved to one side.
Read: Seeing Depth Through a Single Lens
By stitching these two images together into an animation, Crozier and Orth provide a way for amateur photographers and microscopists alike to create the impression of a stereo image without the need for expensive hardware. They are calling their computational method “light-field moment imaging”—not to be confused with “light field cameras” (like the Lytro), which achieve similar effects using high-end hardware rather than computational processing.
Filed Under: Rapid prototyping